This the bit you're talking about?

The figure seems to perpetually sink for the constellations rising about him. He speaks, but his face cannot be seen.
I war not with Men, it says, but with the God.
"Yet no one but Men die," the Aspect-Emperor replies.
The fields must burn to drive Him forth from the Ground.
"But I tend the fields."
The dark figure stands beneath the tree, begins walking towards him. It seems the climbing stars should hook and carry him in the void, but he is like the truth of iron - impervious and immovable.
It stands before him, regards him - as it has so many times - with his face and his eyes. No halo gilds his leonine mane.
Then who better to burn them?

How do you people know this shit?

'Know' is exactly the wrong word. Certainty is the death of wisdom. If I ever claim to actually know for sure what Bakker is trying to say, you can safely assume my monstrous ego has strangled my last vestiges of good sense and is reeling drunkenly around the inside of my skull, terminally high on hubris.

I merely speculate. My quite-screwed-up brain makes daft links between Bakker's writing and various odd things I've picked up over the years from Hofstadter, Hood, Buddhism, Kirkbride, Warhammer, etc. Sometimes a thought seems well-formed enough to put into words and post it here. Occasionally, I even have some coherent idea of what point I'm trying to make.

For the record, this post you're reading right now is not an example of that last one.

If you have been so thoroughly conditioned that your soul moves entirely at the will of another, then is your soul not merely an extension of the soul of your manipulator? Are you not a part of him just as much as his own hand? If so, then Cnaiur is a limb of Kellhus, Kellhus a limb of Ajokli, and Ajokli a divine mantle taken up by Cnaiur-Conditioned-by-Kellhus. Then all three are the same soul, and Possession and Apotheosis are the same thing.

Ajokli is both the Trickster and the Prince of Hate. The Prince hates because he is the Trickster's mark. Both are part of the same story, just like Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox. The story is their shared soul. It's also a circuit of Watcher and Watched. The Prince hates the Trickster because he sees him for what he really is.

A Nonman might point out the difficulty in disentangling the Principles of Hate and War. Inri Sejenus would concur that the same entity can wear different faces. Fane would argue rather huffily that all demons are made of lies anyway so shut up. Memgowa, of course, is just chuckling and shaking his head because he knows everyone else has missed the point entirely.

Perhaps how one perceives Hate and War depends more on the observer than on some immutable Divine Truth.

I'm still not sure why everyone assumes the Mutilated were telling Kellhus the truth about Shauriatas, or indeed about anything else.

Like Kellhus' sword, Certainty is a weapon with two edges.

why couldn't Imimorul have had hair? I don't get it. He's an anomaly in the text for a variety of supernatural reasons.

Maybe the Nonmen are hairless because Imimorul didn't have any hair on his fingers?

In any case, the issue isn't Imimorul's hirsuteness or otherwise, but the strangeness of a hairless species using the word 'hair' as a poetic metaphor.

Also, I love that this has been a point of contention, Duskweaver .

I wouldn't say we were contending. I'm certainly not suggesting that the use of the word 'hair' is a mistake. I just think it raises some potentially interesting questions. Were Nonmen always bald? Did the Amiolas translate the poem non verbum e verbo sed sensum de sensu, hence inserting a metaphor from Sorweel's culture? Did the poem originate as a history lesson from a Nonman to his Emwama, and thus use a metaphor that made sense to them rather than to the poet's own species?

Oh, I like that. I'm sure FB has brought up versions of this before but per-Enlightenment "maps" of reality tended to look like this:

A lot of Great Chain of Being interpretations, right ?

Sure. The Chain is sort of an Ourouboros in Earwa, though, isn't it? Coming too close to the Absolute, the Godhead at the top, damns you and returns you right to the bottom, with the Ciphrang, deader than stone. Unless you can turn it on its side, realise the circle is a spiral (no circle, no soul), and escape laterally into Oblivion.

Although I was really just suggesting that Imimorul might have come from the future.

No, in my analogy the Psukhe is LSD. Or really any psychoactive drug, but LSD sounds right somehow. It doesn't work through senses and cognition like poetry or music or mathematics. It just gets in there and makes you feel stuff directly.

The "you" in the analogy is the World or the God, obviously.

Ok. Well wonder how that got a c horae hoard then if the Apororetic sorcerers are at the Ark?

The Consult gave loads of Chorae to the Men of Eanna prior to the Breaking of the Gates. Along with the Tusk. And the instruction from "The Gods" (*snort!*) to invade Earwa and kill the Nonmen.

All Chorae possessed by Men are ultimately gifts from the Consult. Nothing at all to do with the Siqu / Nonman Tutelage. The Aporos had been forbidden for thousands of years before the Tutelage began.